THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 4, 2016
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in the forties and fifties, was the eighth
child of a sharecropper and a domestic.)
The book begins as a series of letters that
Celie writes to God, because, apart from
her sister, Nettie, she has no one else she
can talk to in their rustic, isolated world.
(Nettie is wonderfully played onstage by
Joaquina Kalukango.) Repeatedly raped
by her stepfather, who takes her babies
away as soon as they're born, Celie spends
her days sidestepping pain and trying
to find order in a harsh, disorderly world.
More or less sold o as an adolescent
to Mister (Isaiah Johnson, who never
hams up the villainy), a farmer who needs
a wife to take care of his children, Celie
describes her nuptials this way:
Dear God, I spend my wedding day running
from the oldest boy. He twelve. His mama died
in his arms and he don't want to hear nothing
bout no new one. He pick up a rock and laid
my head open. The blood run all down tween
my breasts. His daddy say Don't do that! But
that's all he say.
Celie has no defenders, and thus no
love until Shug Avery ( Jennifer Hudson)
appears on the scene.The problem is that
Shug is Mister's longtime mistress, an
itinerant blues singer who believes in the
pleasure that Celie has been denied. The
intimacy between the two women is hard-
won: Shug is defensive about her rela-
tionship with Mister, and Celie resents
having to take care of yet another person
in his life. (He brings the ailing Shug to
stay at their house.) But, through the car-
ing, Celie and Shug bond. Marsha Nor-
man wrote the lean and sensitive stage
adaptation, and it's a measure of her in-
sight when it comes to a play's shape that
she draws out what's essential to the story:
female friendship---and how it can be
sabotaged by poor self-perception.
Eventually, Mister's goofy eldest son,
Harpo (Kyle Scatli e), finds love in the
meaty arms of the outspoken Sofia (Dan-
ielle Brooks), who will not be suppressed.
When Harpo admits that he can't con-
trol his wife, Celie, her eyes hardened by
experience and lack, suggests that he beat
her. It's a shocking moment of betrayal,
but why wouldn't Celie betray another
woman? Time and again, she has been
betrayed and beaten because she's a woman.
As Doyle directs it and Erivo plays it,
Celie is mystified by the women around
her who manage not to be subjugated sur-
vivors. She disapproves of them, and wants
to be like them, and doesn't understand
them. All of this adds up to eros. Erivo
portrays Celie's complications with an as-
tonishing emotional readiness and purity;
she has no truck with the standard Broad-
way bombast. She's a little girl with a big
voice, who, like the young Judy Garland,
doesn't really know how to pretend: what
she has to o er is her authenticity. Erivo
knows why a song works, and how to
make it better. (The music and the lyrics
are by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and
Stephen Bray.) She emotes, but never with
attention-grabbing a ect. Whether she's
singing or simply waiting and watching,
Erivo elevates the musical to a level that
is unusual both on and o Broadway. She
tells the truth, and we want to go wher-
ever it takes her. (Hudson, unfortunately,
is a lacklustre Shug. Performing alongside
Erivo or the fantastic Brooks, she's a ci-
pher, a voice without a soul.)
Walker's novel falters about halfway
through. Celie reads some letters from
Nettie---which Mister hid from her---
and learns that her children, who she
thought were dead, were adopted. This
discovery helps Celie find her own voice
("I may be black. I may be ugly. But I'm
here") and no doubt gives her the cour-
age to move to Tennessee with Shug,
where she designs trousers for women.
Walker's writing is, at times, a little heavy-
handed---pants as a symbol of female in-
dependence---and Steven Spielberg mis-
took that heaviness for seriousness when
he adapted the book for his 1985 film.
Doyle doesn't weigh us down with all
that; he relies on the actors' performances
to tell us what to feel and when. Demon-
strating the skill and imagination he
showed in his revivals of "Sweeney Todd"
and "Company,"in 2005 and 2006, respec-
tively, Doyle also rejects the Broadway
vogue for dramatic stage pictures. Around
the set, which he designed, there are
wooden walls with chairs attached to them.
The chairs are a motif: they're the pews in
Celie's church, and the seating at the juke
joint that Harpo opens near Mister's
house. Celie, a churchgoer who ultimately
builds a temple of the self, sets foot in
Harpo's place only once---to watch Shug
perform. Love is always a great spectacle,
and it's especially satisfying when direc-
tors like Doyle and stars like Erivo un-
derstand that, and something more: black
or white, male or female, theatre-makers
and audiences are united in their interest
in what makes people people.
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Tomer Hanuka, February 10th, 2014